You’ve Come a Medium-Length Way, Baby

It was called “Equal Opportunity for Women Is Smart Business” but it might just as easily have been called “Management Development for Women Is Just Management Development (but with women in it).” That, essentially, was the message behind M. Barbara Boyle’s 10-point affirmative action program for increasing the number of women in the workforce, published in HBR’s May-June issue of 1973.

Forty years on, the early feminist terminology sounds quaint — she labels her 10-point plan a “women’s emphasis program,” for instance, and her references to “Women’s Lib,” “the woman problem,” “consciousness raising,” and “feminine talent” just sound laughable today. (Her dated but well-meaning discussion of race and ethnicity now sounds borderline offensive; Boyle’s hypothetical executive, who asks, “But what do I do if there is a black, a woman, and a Mexican-American equally qualified?” cannot even fathom a black or Latina woman being considered as a candidate — and the illustration of this dilemma on page 87 would never be printed today.)

But the plan itself is essentially a standard road map for any corporate development initiative: Gather data and define the problem; set objectives, establish policy, track progress; hold management accountable, starting with the top; recruit, train, and develop high potentials.

“So many of the elements,” she pointed out herself, “are simply good management procedures… a starting point for implementing personnel systems which benefit all employees.” (Perhaps one — in which she suggests restructuring job responsibilities to make sure they don’t require more technical qualifications than they really need — might bear some thought today.)

All in all, they bear remarkable resemblance to the essential management practices Nicholas Bloom, Raffaella Sadun, and John Van Reenem identified when researching the question “Does Management Really Work,” which you can read about in our most current, November 2012, issue.

What remains stubbornly modern, unfortunately, is Boyle’s assertion that “salary is the area in which it is easiest to identify discriminatory behavior.” Boyle wrote in 1973 that “the average salary of a working woman in this country is less than 60% that of a man.”

How much better are we doing now? No number we hear thrown around is entirely accurate, but an optimistic assessment might be this study released last month by the American Association of University Women, which found that, one year after graduation, female college graduates from the class of 2008 were making only 82% of what their male colleagues were paid.

In other words, 40 years of affirmative action for women has resulted in 22 cents of progress. As Boyle wrote, “We are not utilizing the capabilities of the women in our companies. Kept in ‘women-type’ jobs, they have not efficiently used their aptitudes, intelligence, education, and skills. It is a great economic waste.”

In her discussion of job restructuring, Boyle glowingly heralds the emergence of “a new concept called ‘word processing.'” (Boyle herself worked at IBM, where the concept of word processing was originally promoted in the early 1970s.) She had great hopes, beyond just improved efficiency, for the word-processing system, in which “the typewriter is removed from the woman outside the boss’s office, and all dictating is telephoned to an in-house word-processing center where it is transcribed and returned in a short time.” This new process, the brave seedling of personal technology, would transform “the former secretary” to “an administrative assistant, performing the nontranscription portion of the traditional job plus taking on additional responsibilities.”

History has proved Boyle right. Administrative assistants are commonplace today. Secretaries a rare breed. The “former secretary” has indeed taken on more responsibility, but as a stroll through most offices will demonstrate, administrative assistants — and the few secretaries that remain — are, still, much more often women than men.

Technology in the carpal tunnel era changes at the speed of our flicking fingertips, but equal opportunity merely plods along. At the highest level, women have made barely a dent; of the 100 top-performing CEOs in the world, according to HBR’s January-February 2010 issue, exactly one was female. (Watch for our January-February 2013 issue, which revisits this study.)

Equal opportunity for women is still smart business. Let’s hope we’re doing better another 40 years from now. ________________

Deborah Milstein is a candidate for Harvard Extension School’s graduate certificate in publishing and communications and an editorial intern at HBR. She has worked in diversity, research, and academic administration at Harvard’s Medical and Dental Schools since 2006. Connect with her on Twitter @debmilstein.